Blip on national radar - that can't be good

WARRIORS

The Warriors's Stephen Jackson. The Golden State Warriors played the New Orleans Hornets at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, October 22, 2009. The Warriors defeated the Hornets 126-92.

The Warriors's Stephen Jackson. The Golden State Warriors played the New Orleans Hornets at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, October 22, 2009. The Warriors defeated the Hornets 126-92.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

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The Warriors's Stephen Jackson. The Golden State Warriors played the New Orleans Hornets at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, October 22, 2009. The Warriors defeated the Hornets 126-92.

The Warriors's Stephen Jackson. The Golden State Warriors played the New Orleans Hornets at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, October 22, 2009. The Warriors defeated the Hornets 126-92.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

Blip on national radar - that can't be good

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An interesting sidebar to the Stephen Jackson story is the fact that for the first time in two years and the third time in 12 years, the nation's basketball tastemakers have noticed the Warriors.

As you might guess, that isn't good. And as you might have further guessed, they got bored and stopped.

Since Jackson asked for a trade on the heels of signing a three-year extension he didn't need and shouldn't have been offered, the bizarre cavalcade of events has been too weird even for the rest of the country to ignore. Because the Warriors have been so perfectly ignorable for so long, this is an interesting development.

The last time the Warriors were a national story, they defied logic and the common sense of the Dallas Mavericks' brass to reach the second round of the playoffs. The time before that, Latrell Sprewell grabbed the coach's neck. So you can see that the Warriors' place in the NBA is a lot like the life cycle of the cicada - every decade or so, they bore to the surface, build a small mud chimney and then fly away, as anyone who has lived below ground would do.

Anyway, the big national thinkers, such as they are, finally noticed in the last two weeks what we here have been doing for the last dozen years - teeing off on our tone-deaf, success-resistant, short-attention-span, perpetually-confused and aggressively-11th-place basketball team.

Yes, a dozen years. You can see our level of effectiveness in taste-changing.

The tone of their analyses - from CBSSports.com to MSNBC to Yahoo to Fox to ESPN - was largely uncomplimentary, with their major points being that the Warriors are incompetent, petty, sinister, vindictive, greedy and, most damning of all, a combination of the above.

All because October is the slowest month of the NBA calendar (the games don't matter, and there are no longer such things as roster surprises). All because Stack Jack (which by the way is also the name of the No. 5 at the International House of Pancakes) made a delightfully spectacular spectacle of himself.

And all because the rest of the country finally figured out that the Pacific Division has five teams, and the fifth team not only comes from a fictional land but is actually slightly more laughably disorganized than even the Kings or Clippers.

Not exactly breaking news, we here understand. We've lived through it. Then again, anything the Warriors do that is noticed east of Pinole is a pretty big deal because the Warriors have been the most featureless team in the entire league for years now. Not good enough to make you ever think it has a chance, but not bad enough to make you think about the 1973 Philadelphia 76ers team that went 9-73.

Just relentless, remorseless, soul-crushing 11th-place-ery.

This isn't a case of small-town complex talking, either. The Bay Area is still the fifth largest market in the country, and as such should be of more interest than it is. And this isn't anti-East Coast bias, either. New York has the Knicks, remember?

Still, on the notion that bad publicity is still better than no publicity, the Warriors finally enter a season with national buzz. At least we think.

What we actually suspect is that all those outlets who cheerfully collated our area's years of work and distilled it for an audience that largely couldn't give a damn have had their fill of the Warriors for this season, too. We feel confident they won't be fooled by the Warriors' feeble early schedule, and we rest comfortably knowing that LeBron, Kobe, D-Wade, CP3 and all the other cool kids will be doing things when the season starts Tuesday so that they will be able to ignore the Warriors again with their typical devotion.

This puts pressure on Jackson to ramp up the rage, which won't be easy considering where the bar already rests. He could play dressed as Che Guevara. He could pants Don Nelson. He could enter the game against the Spurs and block Stephen Curry's first three shots. His only limitation is his imagination.

(Marketing idea: Maybe the Warriors can pay him to use some of these tactics, because we know how he feels about their money and we know how they feel about people paying attention to them.)

The alternative - anonymity through dignity - is too dreadful to contemplate. If Jackson is going to go about his trade demand with honor and effort, then the Warriors get nothing out of it. The national thinkers have drifted off, and our little team returns to its typical faceless state, with us fulminating about why nothing ever changes except the details. After being the league's designated piñata for two weeks, that will seem particularly unfulfilling.

Then again, even the worst case scenario has an upside. At least now the team has a twist on the old slogan.